It is desirable in many situations to record communications, such as telephone calls. This is particularly so in a contact center in which many agents may be handling hundreds of telephone calls each every day. Recording of these telephone calls can allow for quality assessment of agents, improvement of agent skills and/or dispute resolution, for example.
In this regard, assessment of call quality is time consuming and very subjective. For instance, a telephone call may last from a few seconds to a few hours and may be only one part of a customer interaction or may include several independent interactions. The demeanor of the caller is also influenced by events preceding the actual conversation—for example, the original reason for the call; the time spent waiting for the call to be answered or the number of times the customer has had to call before getting through to the right person.
Assessing the “quality” of a telephone call is therefore difficult and subject to error, even when done by an experienced supervisor or full-time quality assessor. Typically, the assessment of a call is structured according to a pre-defined set of criteria and sub-criteria. Some of these may relate to the initial greeting, the assessment of the reason for the call, the handling of the core reason for the call, confirming that the caller is satisfied with the handling of the call, and leaving the call.
Automation of the assessment process by provision of standardized forms and evaluation profiles have made such assessment more efficient, but it is still impractical to assess more than a tiny percentage of calls. Moreover, even with a structured evaluation form, different assessors will evaluate a call differently with quite a wide variation of scores. Notably, this degree of inconsistency tends to produce haphazard scoring of agent performance, particularly when agents typically are scored based on a designated number of calls per month.